Watery bodies, heavy water, waterborne spirits and fixed salt. The roots of the seeds are different due to the different characteristics of the salts in the waters which cause them to dissolve. And salts are important because spirits dwell there. LeBreton anatomizes the alchemical operation of the solution in its smallest details. My translation from the original French edition of 1722.
On General Solution
Aphorism I
The solution is the conversion of the fixed radical humid into an aqueous body.
II
The cause of this solution is the volatile spirit hidden in the first water.
III
When this water has made the perfect solution of the fixed, it is called fountain of life, nature of the fixed, Diana naked and free.
IV
Nature, the principle of all movements and actions in the mixed, is immediately hidden only in the fixed salt.
V
It is dissolved to free it from its gross thickness and to make it capable of penetrating by this means.
VI
Water is the bond of the volatile spirit.
VII
Superfluous water is separated by distillation, and only as much is kept as is necessary to return the spirit to its land.
VIII
With this solution, the pure salt, which can resolve itself, is separated from impure earth that cannot be separated by water.
IX
After this solution, the two roots are made to rise together in the form of heavy water by dissipation.
X
Heavy water is a median substance in which the two tinctures, body and spirit, and the two roots of the Philosophers’ stone, are joined together.
XI
After the distillation of the heavy water, sublimation follows, which is a new conjunction of this pure heavy water with the pure fixed salt.